Ultimate goal is to be oblivious in oblivion, but not yet. Yet for a moment there was a droll sense of being halfway there, reminiscent of being half forgotten, when hyphens cross the event-horizon to disappear into the singularity of h2g2 space on the Internet. No response from the illustrious guide. A faint radiation from passage of hyphens produced a correlation of mind and a lateral shift in the address matrix. And lo Fu-Manchu exists.

Musical Qualification

Winifred Atwell was a two-handed¹ piano player from Jamaica who recorded the Black & White Rag on 78 rpm² disc; she was responsible for first making Fu-Manchu sit up and take notice of music when he heard her sounds coming from a radiogram.

Atwell was the beginning that led to novelty songs sometimes broadcast by the BBC Light Programme, to the Limehouse Blues, the music of the Temperance Seven, Bonzo Dog Doo-Daa Band, Spike Jones and the City Slickers; to Peter Sellers’ rendition of Any Old Iron, his Ying-tong Song; on down to Spike Milligan and the Massed Alberts’ You Gotta Go Oww!. Add to this Fu-Manchu’s hobby as grim executioner of tunes on the gallows of any convenient piano—his victims are numerous—and you have a person well-qualified to talk about music. Ha-ha-ha!

Biography

First biographer of Fu-Manchu was Sax Rohmer who committed a series of vile calumnies upon the good doctor; luckily, Rohmer is little read these days, leaving Fu-Manchu to pursue his plans largely undisturbed. Wikipedia has an entry for Fu-Manchu that describes him as an evil genius, which is an absolutely outrageous defamation; when compared to the Neocon Candidate who leads the Godless Oligarch Party in the year 2006, Fu-Manchu is the epitome of civilised man and a beneficent humanitarian.

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¹ Two-handed is a term sometimes applied to stride pianists steeped in the ragtime genre who succeed in simulating an ensemble; James P Johnson was another, as was Eubie Blake.
² rpm—Revolutions Per Minute